April 2009 – Screenshot

Not really a recipe

I have been trying to get into the habit of taking a real lunch to work with me, and making up a batch of brown rice for the week that I can top with stuff seemed like a good idea – it would be filling and easy to throw together in the morning. Unfortunately, while I know brown rice is much better for me than white, I have not yet come around to liking the taste as much. So I decided I needed to make something aggressive enough to put on brown rice, while still being compatible with its flavor. … Continue reading Not really a recipe

Yeah but assignment operators are cheap…

By AMH

Coding Horror is often fun, and a good read, particularly for aspiring techies who want an inside glimpse of some of the details that would make up your life if you pursue that path. But when I read Jeff’s post on spaces versus tabs in code formatting I both cracked up and immediately thought of one of my Data Structures students who has to reformat any piece of code he is given before he starts working with it. With my students deep into their team projects, I wonder if they are running into the conflict that Jeff claims is inevitable: … Continue reading Yeah but assignment operators are cheap…

My Body My Data

By AMH

Medical databases are one of the huge trends in IT right now, and there are a lot of people looking at how to make national, integrated personal medical information databases a reality. There are also a lot of people looking at the special requirements for accuracy and privacy when building such databases. I like this person’s comments, from a patient’s perspective, on the importance of sharing ownership of the records with the patient. The comments were triggered by someone commenting that they signed up for Google Health and found it to be a combination of inaccurate and with troubling omissions … Continue reading My Body My Data

Don’t discount the crossword puzzle in all this

By AMH

Maybe the most interesting thing about this summary of responses to questions about the future of newspapers by a variety of newspaper and media experts is that they all urge newspapers to be very hesitant about reducing their number of print days per week, but they also concur that in ten years we will no longer have daily print newspapers. Common wisdom is that, at some point in the not too distant future, newspapers are going to have to leave their bulky physical form behind, but it seems that these experts think it is more important now to start reshaping … Continue reading Don’t discount the crossword puzzle in all this